Here’s Hard Data for Headlines that Spread on Twitter

Many bloggers already know that Twitter is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog.

When I talked to Guy Kawasaki about my book, he called the Tweetmeme Retweet button “the most important button on the web,” because of the enormous traffic-driving power it possesses. With one click, any of your readers can spread your post to hundreds or thousands of their followers.

As a marketer, I, of course, see this as an opportunity for optimization. When I see a powerful tool, my first impulse is to figure out how to make it even more powerful.

When you click that button, Tweetmeme grabs the title of the page it’s on, shortens the URL, and combines the two into a autofilled tweet for posting. Thus, the title of your post becomes the tweet that is shared with a potentially huge number of Twitter users.

Nearly 20% of all “normal” tweets contain a link, yet almost 70% of retweets do. Retweeting is the most common way links are shared on Twitter.

I’ve done research into various factors surrounding retweets and found a handful of factors that you may want to take into consideration when writing headlines for posts that you hope to share and spread on Twitter.

Use nouns and third-person verbs

When I looked at the parts of speech that occur in retweets versus those that occur in normal tweets, I found that retweets tend to be noun-heavy and use third-person verbs.

A headline should never talk about all the things you did yesterday and how you did them, as past-tense verbs and adverbs both lead to far fewer retweets.

The most (and least) retweetable words

The words that tend to occur more in retweets than in normal tweets are topped by the word “you.”

This means, whenever possible, you should talk directly to your readers. “Top” and “10” also rank highly, showing that lists do well on Twitter. Not surprisingly, talking about social media and Twitter itself also helps.

On the other side of the coin are the least retweetable words. Random first-person verbs and details about your life, however fascinating you may find it, don’t get a ton of retweets.

Tell me something new

I compared how common words in retweets are to how often these same common words appear in normal tweets, and found that rare and more novel words are highly retweetable.

When you’re writing your headlines, you should be striving to say something new that breaks through the clutter of everyday chatter.

Don’t be dumb

I expected to find that retweets were simple and required less intelligence to understand. But my data showed the opposite.

Using two readability metrics, I found that retweets often use longer, more complex words. So don’t try to “dumb down” your headlines for Twitter; users and power retweeters are smarter than you may think.

Stop talking about yourself

LIWC is a linguistic system designed to identify concepts in pieces of text.

The most striking thing I found when using LIWC to analyze retweets is that self reference does not get a lot of sharing.

In other words, don’t talk about yourself if you want Twitter traffic; talk about your readers.

If you’ve been in social media awhile, you probably already guessed that was the case — now you’ve got the data to back it up.

Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist. For more social media science like this, buy Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness on Amazon. It's $7.99 for the Kindle version (which will work on any computer or device) -- and if you're an Amazon Prime member, you can even read it for free.

Thank you for sharing this data. I am using the twitter to gain traffic but I can’t maximize the use of it or I can’t make it as powerful as I want it to be. Hope your post can help me enhance my knowledge.

I wonder if the data on this is influenced by the person doing the retweeting. If you have a strong relationship with your audience (or just a very large audience), I’d imagine you’d get a higher RT rate regardless of the words you use.

That said, I’m glad you posted this, because it’s important to note that a number of the “most retweetable” words are calls to action (please help. please RT, check out, etc.). We should never underestimate the power of a good call to action – click here to learn why!

Very informative article. I’ve been using twitter for awhile now and I used to just post my “daily thoughts” til I realized how big it’s potential for marketing. This article showed with data that it does work. Thanks for this post!

Interesting data. I see a lot of retweets that end in LOL. They always get my attention just because someone thinks it’s funny and I want to be humored also. So it is always a good way to go when writing a headline on twitter.

The same advice for retweets applies to guest posts. In this post, you unwittingly used the word “I” 10 times and the word “my” 3 times (and threw in a book plug). This will certainly decrease your comment numbers.

On a related note, isn’t it ironic that the best word to use in retweets is “you,” but the button to do so is called “Tweet(ME-ME)”. 😉

This was really great info to us new to Twitter. Thanks for helping out with a really good roadmap. There is nothing worse than having to filter through all the garbage on Twitter, and this is a great way to make sure people aren’t “filtering” me out! You can follow me if you like: DrapesGirl

I don’t think this is surprising. I’ve heard about practically nothing else this year. Eventually I felt I had to join, but when I did I felt lost in cyberspace. This blogpost makes alot more sense of twitter. I shall bookmark it.

Fascinating. You could use this post as a cheat sheet for writing eyeball hijacking headlines as well….

Good stuff. On another note – I will quibble a bit with the “Don’t be Dumb” conclusions.

The results show a 6th grade reading level – no real significant difference between tweets and retweets. Sixth grade reading level still requires making your copy simple. People may be smart but would rather read simple stuff. 🙂

Excellent material! It will be a great help in composing tweets that I want retweeted.

It’s also interesting that the terms “please”, “retweet”, and “please retweet” are three of the Top-10 most frequent phrases. It would be good to know how frequently the term “please” is also followed by “RT” and “retweet” is preceeded by “pls”, thus making these all equivalent.

The implicit conclusion one can also draw from that is that simply asking for something to be retweeted would seem to be VERY EFFECTIVE. Can this be confirmed?
-David

Great post, I really enjoy when you provide useful information that if implemented can really make a different on how we use the Marketing tools available…thanks and I have already tweaked my wording on my tweets, will let you how I make out.
Manon

Dan, your info is very valuable to someone like myself who is in the infant stage of blogging (actually its more like pre-born stage.) At this point I can’t say that I really understand everything, but the more I read, the clearer it becomes. Thanks for sharing the research you’ve done.

Extremely helpful and it would be interesting to see how you did the actual research (did excel come into play?).

Personally I find myself battling with headlines as I want to make them catchy, while at the same time not just a trickery to get people to read my blog. A good medium approach is most likely best there.

Too often I click on catchy headline just to find that the headline has little or nothing to do with the content. Having your headline relevant must always be kept in mind as well – not just what will make people visit your side.

Dan, great information. I had no idea how thorough some people have been with gathering Twitter data. I’m still not convinced as to the amount of time one needs to spend on Twitter to make it worth while, but this post gives me a little more hope.

I love the Tweetmeme Retweet button. Just attended local Society for Technical Communicators meeting and the discussion was “Best Practices for Turning Web Content into Search Engine Snack Food”. We discussed the value of Twitter which many had yet to try. I plan to share this article with tonight’s group. Fascinating about using Please Retweet this in the headline. I’ll have to try it. Keep the valuable info coming.

Very useful data, Dan. I liked the top retweeted words especially ‘you’, amazing how we can go wrong with word misuse.
Thank you for presenting the graphs and stats; can’t beat that for good in-your-face facts.

I must say I’m also surprised by the readability grade levels, did expect the opposite too; aren’t we always being told not to get too ‘complicated’ in what we say? Seems Twitter has its own rules.

Thanks for this post Dan.
It’s interesting to see the difference a few words can make and everyone should be taking care when posting.
It’s obvious to talk about your readers rather than yourself when writing any content, but it’s so easy to forget with tweets especially if there are things you want to tell the world about.

I guess Twitter is fine and I can see it works – however I don’t have a twitter account (pre-blogging) and I’m really hesitant to start using it just because I have a blog. If I do set up a Twitter account, how do people even know I’m there to follow?